You go to the doctor with a chronic headache and he suggests cutting off your head. The doctor assures you that this will put a permanent end to your headaches. Sounds crazy, but that is the same logic the medical community often uses with the biologically imperfect. Your baby has a heart condition, chromosomal abnormality, missing a limb, blind, or deaf? No problem, there is a final solution that will completely cure your child – death.
Over a year ago a new friend needed help. Her daughter was diagnosed with Trisomy 18 and struggling to survive. She went to the hospital with her infant and was told that her daughter was too small to receive any of the tests requested by her pediatrician. The doctors at the hospital were going to send her home, but instead her mother followed sound advice from another parent and transferred to a different hospital. Once at the other hospital, the little girl was examined and immediately intubated because she had been struggling to breathe. It was determined that her jaw was too short and she needed surgery quickly. In fact, the infant had jaw distraction surgery just 2 days later which lengthened her jaw and opened up her airway so she could breathe. The first hospital which also performed jaw distraction surgeries was sending this infant child with Trisomy 18 home knowing full well that the child would die without medical attention. Death was their cure, but thankfully with appropriate help this little girl is now almost a year and a half old and doing well.
The medical doctrine of biological superiority can be seen crystal clear in prenatal tests that search out the disabled for the primary purpose and devastating result of destroying them. Exactly how developments and innovations in the field of medicine are to be developed with various disabilities when the patients are routinely terminated is an awful dilemma. Armed with only the knowledge of how to single out the weak, but not how to treat them has turned medicine into a bizarre pseudoscience that destroys those they cannot understand and do not wish to treat. Really – when did the disabled become too risky for society to tolerate? Certainly, tyrants, the violent, liars, thieves, even the self-righteous are bigger threats to society than these vulnerable individuals. Imagine a world where they could find a genetic code for all of the undesirable traits in people…would any of us survive?
When medical tests, especially prenatal tests, become more important for our academic research than for the human being they are being performed on we have an ugly problem. We become like the unmonitored medical ministers of death in the 1940’s who deliberately infected their patients with disease and subjected vulnerable people to cruel experiments and ‘treatments’ all under the guise of furthering medical research. We would be foolish to believe that a medical community is willing to help all of humanity if it refuses to help the human being right in front of them. They are like miners panning for gold that hold onto the dust and dump the gold.
We have made the womb into a hunting ground for the disabled child who has no means of escape. Do we find the death of the sick, weak, deformed more humane than their life and preservation? We have become a society more frightened of “wrongful birth” than deliberate death.
We have even expunged the verbal language that represents mercy from society so that we will not be confronted with our own barbarism. Starving a disabled child to death can now be called comfort care. Medically prescribed overdose can be called hospice. Heartbreaking suicide can be labeled death with dignity. There used to be a time when those who were weak, sick, and without hope were given help not offered death.
The destruction of the disabled is a crime without a name to represent its horror, like the Holocaust or homicide. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, found that language did not have a word to adequately describe the brutal annihilation of certain groups of people and coined the term genocide. The Greek word genos, (tribe or race), was added to the Latin word cide, (killing). The conscience of our society no longer wishes to be pin pricked with words that awaken our shame and insist on changing the language instead of our actions. The deliberate and systematic destruction of the disabled and unwanted should have its own chilling name to combat the sinister silence with which society treats their deaths.
Who will bear witness for the weak and most vulnerable people? What if we have terminated the best among us? What if they were the smartest, kindest, most beautiful souls? How would the world be different if the millions of people that have been destroyed would have lived?
